Did the Crusade for Human Rights Lead to More Inequality?

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By Mitchell Cohen

May 18, 2018

NOT ENOUGH Human Rights in an Unequal World By Samuel Moyn 277 pp. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $29.95.

“Rights” is an inescapable word in modern politics. But asserting rights is easier than demarcating them. Should they be just political, or also social and economic? Must they rest on international or national laws, or do they embody “self-evident” truths? “We agree about the rights, but on condition no one asks us why,” said a participant in deliberations on the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Samuel Moyn’s “Not Enough” continues his effort to recast the history of the “human rights politics” that materialized in the 1970s with the Helsinki Accords and Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy. This new attention was, he argued in “The Last Utopia,” a consequence of decolonization, the Vietnam War’s end and the decay of Communist regimes. As older visions dissipated, “idealists,” some in Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, pursued a new “moral consciousness.”

But Moyn labeled this shallow utopianism because it made economic inequality secondary, at best. His new book elaborates on these arguments, looking back at the evolution of welfare states and the allied idea of “social citizenship” (rights to education, health care and housing), while targeting the neoliberalism of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. By “neoliberalism,” Moyn (a professor of law and history at Yale) evidently means the global surge of “market fundamentalism” associated with Milton Friedman or the World Bank. Human rights ideology and neoliberalism were not twins, Moyn says, but both fostered a perception that social justice was passé or, worse, evocative of awful regimes. Democratic welfare states, meanwhile, were experiencing difficulties.

“Not Enough” is strongest addressing points like these. Sympathetic readers may, however, question its reconstructions of history and ideas. Welfare states sought a social minimum for citizens, but by accepting national boundaries, Moyn thinks, they unavoidably allowed the rich to “tower over the rest.” By contrast, genuine equality demands global “ambition” with no hierarchies.

Moyn often sidesteps real politics. He seems little interested in how Sweden’s welfare state was shaped by an innovative Social Democratic Party enacting policies that broadened support for egalitarianism. It wasn’t global. He is disappointed that the Labour Party did not turn construction of a welfare state in postwar Britain into an internationalist project — as if Labour could have persuaded workers to make global economic redistribution an immediate priority rather than, say, a right to health care.

Parts of the left, faced with the facts that Marx’s working class was neither homogeneous nor history’s protagonist, substituted for it a romanticized third world. Moyn is, finally, a third worldist. He tells us that “distributive ideals” of postcolonial societies “are an almost unstudied topic” and lauds their “zeal” for building welfare states while aiming “to globalize distributive equality.” Moyn seems taken by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rhetoric. Something is missing here. Both Nasser and Jawaharlal Nehru were anti-imperialist, but Nehru pursued egalitarianism with democracy, while Nasser imposed a military regime. Might it be possible to interrogate abuses visited on Western workers and victims of colonialism without mythologizing either?

Moyn asserts that whoever settled for human rights as “the essential bulwark against atrocity” ought now “relearn the … grander choice between socialism or barbarism” and make “the global project it” — presumably “it” is socialism — “has rarely been but must become.”

Who wouldn’t prefer socialism to barbarism? But Moyn leaves socialism undefined, seeming only to envision its global arrival through challenges to equally undefined neoliberalism. One assumes it means a global redistributive mechanism. But then would not less-than-global means be needed to adjust universal objectives to local, democratic determinations of priorities? Perhaps self-governing states?

In our rattled times, with Europe’s left in a tailspin and Trump in the White House, with political and social rights besieged, post-utopian egalitarians may need more than globalized third worldism.

Mitchell Cohen, an editor emeritus of Dissent, teaches political science at Baruch College. His latest book is “The Politics of Opera.”